


Ex Corporibus

by CorpseBrigadier



Series: Reliquiae [2]
Category: Final Fantasy Tactics
Genre: Abuse, Altar Sex, Angst, Aroused Victim, Canonical Character Death, Demonic Possession, Dysfunctional Family, Head Injury, Hurt/Incredibly Maladaptive Attempts at Comfort, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Rape Aftermath, Rape/Non-con Elements, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Scars, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-26
Updated: 2020-01-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:29:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 7
Words: 8,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22336324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorpseBrigadier/pseuds/CorpseBrigadier
Summary: Roughly a month after having a fraught encounter with Wiegraf in Lesalia, Zalbag encounters him again--or at least something that wears his shape. Sequel to "Ex Ornamentis."
Relationships: Belias/Zalbaag Beoulve, Dycedarg Beoulve & Zalbaag Beoulve, Wiegraf Folles/Zalbaag Beoulve
Series: Reliquiae [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1611859
Comments: 6
Kudos: 4





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Sequel to ["Ex Ornamentis"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20410552/) (although the prior work stands on its own if you do not desire a sad follow up).
> 
> * * *
> 
>  **Note on Names:** I freely mix PSX and PSP names without remorse.
> 
>  **Note on Content:** Please heed the warnings and tags; this is violent whumpy darkfic involving a character being raped and severely injured. It also employs a characterization of the Glabados faith as homophobic in ways intended to be _very_ vaguely comparable to medieval Christianity (and yes... I know medieval models of sexuality are more complex than my tropey JPRG nonsense delves into), touches upon obviously abusive/dysfunctional family dynamics, and is just generally a self-indulgent downer. There is also a brief mention of stillbirths/death in childbirth and a mention of some canonical priest stabbing.
> 
> _**Note on Title:** I am a complete idiot, and I realized five months after I wrote this that I used the genitive singular instead of the ablative plural of "corpus." This work was originally titled "Ex Corporis," but I fixed it._

_“Is this the full and manifest glory of the faith then?” Wiegraf hissed. “Are you quite proud of yourself, Izlude? Will you boast to you father about your great triumph over Father Penn-Lashich?”_

_Izlude looked at the ground, knuckles whitening as he clasped the haft of his lance. He did not want to have to concoct an answer. He did not want to think of Father Penn-Lashich at all._

_“We had our orders,” he said haltingly after what seemed a very long silence. “There are higher concerns at—”_

_He was cut off as his companion cuffed him, and his weapon clattered to the ground as he reached up reflexively to touch his face. Izlude froze, trying to swallow back down the lump in his throat. He would not let the stinging in his eyes progress to the humiliation of tears. Even if it was only Wiegraf who struck him, he did not want to betray that sort of weakness. He did not want to make things worse._

_“Did you think that he might send up an alarm and call up all the other seventy-year-old monks?” Wiegraf continued. “We’d fucking be in for it then, Izlude!”_

_“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I’m sorry… If he still lives…”_

_There was a shout from the corridor, and both men looked to one another. Whatever Izlude had thought might be done about the old man in the library drifted from the scope of their concern as a knight in Glabados colors bounded over the dry stone floor of the vault towards them._

_“Someone’s coming!” she cried. “Riders at the gates!”_

_Izlude picked up his lance and looked to Wiegraf. As he waited for him to say something regarding what they should do, he took note as Wiegraf traced the contours of the gold icon he now wore over his tabard. It was a gesture he had seen him perform many times before: a sort of nervous action he undertook often and without seeming thought. When asked about it directly, back when he wore an icon of simple iron, he had said something about memories. Izlude had let the matter drop._

_“I’m heading towards the vaults,” Wiegraf said tersely after a moment. “Try not to rush out and slaughter a bunch of pilgrims unless it’s strictly necessary.”_

_He turned suddenly, striding off intently towards one of the winding staircases that led downward into the abbey’s sub-basements. Izlude, face still smarting from where he had been struck, began to realize that he would have to command the bulk of their entourage himself._

_He stumbled through how best to compose himself and his men, thinking back to the endless charts and schema that had passed before his eyes back at Murond. He closed his eyes a moment as a man asked where they ought wait. The cringing contortions of the old man’s withered features, the sudden shock of blood on his surplice—they could plague him another time. He would confess later. He would weep later. He would let whatever penitence or penalty was his fall upon him later._

_Unlike Wiegraf, he knew the extent to which he was haunted, and he would make allowances for it._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Fun Facts:** The title is taken from a Latin term meaning "from the body," which refers in Catholicism to relics made from the physical bodies of saints. (It's plural here—and actually in what _should be_ the right declension—as there are multiple bodies at play. Typically it would be singular: "ex corpore")


	2. Chapter 2

Hours later, after Wiegraf had resigned himself to the necessity of removing the weeping girl and all that entailed, he delivered the speech he had envisioned for the past year and a half, and he delivered it flawlessly. 

He said every biting word that had been in his heart; he made every retort he had planned to make to every objection Ramza Beoulve might possibly raise. If it has been festival season in the land of his youth, the guild might well have given him a prize for committing his lines so well to memory. The confrontation had all the trappings of melodrama and morality that made for a good passion play, and it was a damned shame that he could not be moved by his own performance.

It was all such dismal foolishness. Ramza was not Zalbag, but he could not help but carry some trace of Zalbag’s likeness. What revenge could he enjoy with _that_ weight on his brain? Did he envision himself at his sister’s grave, telling her of his gallant deeds? “Be at peace Miluda, I ran through Ramza just before the rest of the country dragged him to a pyre, and I grieved General Beoulve a little earlier by ineptly fumbling about with him at an inn.”

He did his utmost not to let thoughts of that mortifying encounter affect him, but he recognized after a few passes that this was futile. It incensed him that the boy should look upon him and mock him, trading barbs that presumed some knowledge of him and his griefs. 

Wiegraf pressed on, drew the white flame of his arts into the strike, retreated before Ramza could make a riposte. All the while, some irrational fear gripped him that the bright-eyed youth might annihilate him, basilisk like, with his gaze. 

Ramza was not Zalbag, he told himself as he feinted and lunged. Ramza had been a child throughout the last war. He pressed against the long monastery shelves, trying to keep track of whomever was behind him. Somewhere, the knight who had previously flagged Izlude down gave a pained shout. Wiegraf did not rush to her aid but closed his eyes a moment in the flicker of swords beating.

Ramza, Wiegraf thought, probably yet bore no scars.

When next he looked to his opponent, he found that the boy’s eyes had drifted to the gaudy ornament at his neck and that they had widened in baffled recognition. Wiegraf froze a moment, breathed, and tried to take advantage of the distraction—tried not to think about what it meant. As he made that push, however, he suddenly felt the bite of steel slide between his ribs. 

The spit in his mouth turned to bitterness and copper, and he realized that he’d half run himself onto the youth’s blade. 

Ramza, looking unerringly at the icon his brother had worn until recently, seemed quite as shocked as he was.

_“Wiegraf!”_

Everything, half dark and drifting, seemed a blur after that. He was on stone. He was in rain. The drops of water bored through him as they hit the stinging surface of his injuries. 

The girl still cried, and the boy still shouted, and he was dying.

He tried to imagine them then: all those shadows of the comrades he’d failed. He tried to imagine Miluda. He could conjure none of them to mind. He said things to the mud, choked out an order, tried to pour the sudden heat of the stone he held back into his body. Nothing availed.

Before he saw the flare of the blue light above, he wept. Death made him childish, and like a child he hoped that somebody might hold him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Fun Facts:** Early plays in real world medieval times were often productions put on by tradesmen's guilds, and I'm having Wiegraf be familiar with them on account of being characterized here as a blacksmith's son.


	3. Chapter 3

That the Northern Sky had somehow turned the Nanten back from the pass was a miracle, but there was no sense of that when they rode back into Lesalia. The streets of the capital were thick-packed with refugees from the eastern provinces, and none wished to think overlong as to whether their protectors might have cut down a neighbor or kinsman in the thick of the battle. As Zalbag wound his way back towards the heart of the city, he recognized that it had not rained since the night of his departure. The green on the trees outside the imperial palace seemed out of step with the season. Though it was midsummer, the hills he’d passed riding south had all been the color of rust.

Dycedarg had found him before he’d found his own offices again, and he embraced him with uncharacteristic enthusiasm and a sharp laugh.

“How does it feel to be a hero again, brother? They won’t last half the autumn at this rate!”

Zalbag had smiled and said nothing.

Later, after the War Council had informed him of all the particulars that hadn’t been sent him on the field, after Larg invited him to dine and wholly understood that he should decline, after some chemist did him the service of cutting out the catgut from a minor wound before it healed wrong—after all that, he found his way to where they’d quartered him in the palace and sat still in the gathering dark.

He reached beneath his tunic and pulled out the wrought iron icon that had lain hard against his skin all throughout the weeks prior. There was a dizzying sort of nausea to hold it and know it was real—to have tangible evidence that the last night he had stayed in Lesalia prior was spent on a bed that Wiegraf Folles had pressed him into.

He exhaled deeply. It was a selfish thing to let a sin he had undertaken willingly grieve him so much. His brother was being hunted by the devout in all the seven territories. His sister had vanished, possibly in a known heretic’s company. He had spent the past three weeks cutting down men who like as not once marched alongside him into Ordallia. If he wanted to wallow in his shame over letting some criminal Templar despoil him, he told himself he could take it to a confessor.

He was not rushing to do so, however, nor did he put the icon away. The fact that he had opted to wear it all this time and not to discard it for another said enough about how he regarded the matter. 

On that evening, looking out at the dimming outlines of Lesalia’s steeples and towers, he held it fast. 

He gripped tightly that memento of his one and only lapse from chastity, and realizing the perverse futility of the gesture, he used it to pray.

* * *

Zalbag awoke to the sounding of Lauds from the high cathedral, prayed once more, washed, and prepared himself for whatever would be demanded of him now that he was back in the midst of men who did not make their living on the battlefield. Dycedarg intercepted him before he could make his way to the former parliamentary buildings now milling with strategists. 

He was told very firmly that nobody in the capital was disposed to making war before afternoon these days, and Zalbag was thereafter dragged to a breakfast for which he had little appetite.

Whomever had been the Atkaschas’ chef was apparently spared the full fury of the Nanten. Dycedarg cheerfully recommended their eel pie as the two of them sat on one of the palace balconies, everything about them burnt white with the harsh light of the summer sun. When he found Zalbag slow to respond, Dycedarg put in the request himself. In the meantime someone or another brought both of them each a glass of hot wine.

“Zelmonian Red.” Dycedarg raised the chalice to his lips. “It was always fine stuff but tastes all the finer now that we won’t be getting anything new out of Zelmonia.”

Zalbag sighed, not touching his cup but nevertheless resigning himself to the eels.

“If you don’t drink it, I will,” Dycedarg said nonchalantly.

“It’s not yet first hour. Don’t you have to spend the day being diplomatic or some such thing?”

“I do.” Dycedarg raised the glass to his lips again. “All the more reason to drink well at breakfast.”

Zalbag dropped the matter. 

“It was good of you to leave when you did, by the way,” Dycedarg continued, eyes cast towards the door. “Matters with the Church were sorted out within a few days of you heading north. Orlandu would probably be supping here in our stead if you’d let yourself be delayed.”

“Matters were sorted out?” Zalbag asked apprehensively. “Then Ramza…”

“Matters were sorted out _as regard you_ ,” Dycedarg said in a low voice, brow slightly furrowed. “I don’t think anyone’s in a position to help Ramza at this point.” 

Zalbag nodded as somebody arrived with a pastry done up with savory leaf and stewed currants, several rubbery coils protruding from its upper crust. He was glad it was apparently no longer the fashion to leave the heads on. 

“If it sets you at ease, nobody at Murond is making any official inquires about Alma at present,” Dycedarg said as he sipped his wine. “Should the two of them keep out of sight and gain some measure of sense, I suspect we’d stand a decent chance with a petition for pardon once this damned war is over.”

There was much on Zalbag’s mind that he did not say and did not wish to say. He was certainly in no position to critique his brother’s flippant attitude towards the Offices of the Pardoner at present, and the myriad sentiments he held as regarded the fate of their youngest siblings were not ones he wished to cast before Dycedarg. He watched in silence as a domestic served them, the edges of his nails biting into his balled fists. 

“You’re awfully morose for somebody who just saved the capital, you know?” Dycedarg said after a mouthful of eel. “I apologize if I ought not have brought it up.”

“Do you think they’ll execute him?”

“I think our brother, however I might feel about him personally, has proven exceptionally adept at not dying when by all rights he ought.” Dycedarg sighed. “Murond also has plentiful other considerations on her hands these days, and she’s apparently parading the former Captain Folles about as if to advertise how easily ecclesiastical law can be bent to keep a man from the gibbet.”

A smile faded from Dycedarg's lips as Zalbag felt his own face go pale. For the rest of the meal, nothing touching on the fractured state of House Beoulve was discussed. Zalbag ate his food and sipped his wine in penitential silence.

* * *

When the Templarate did return to Lesalia, Zalbag faced none of the pandemonium that characterized their first visit. There was no Northern Sky stronghold under siege; there was no Examiner conducting active investigations; there had been no fraught reunions with lost brothers. He had spent a restless week doing nothing of real import. He had taken exercise. He had made arrangements as regarded the coming march. He had paid for prayers on behalf of the dead. When no news from any informant came out of Bethla, he had eventually been made to accept one of Larg’s invitations to supper. 

At night, he had prayed, and sometimes he awakened to find legible marks on his palm from where the sharp iron of the icon had bitten into his skin. 

He was almost anxious that something _should_ happen by the time he found himself once more in his office and was suddenly told that a member of the Templarate wished to speak with him. He gave his assent. No breath nor tremor animated his body as he listened to the echo of footsteps within the hall.

When Wiegraf stood before him as he had nearly a month prior, he stood as well.

“Templar Folles.”

“General Beoulve.”

They nodded to one another with the formality of perfect strangers. 

“I have returned with some news out of Murond. Would you care to sit down?”

Zalbag did not hold his gaze on Wiegraf long, nor did he look about for the gold-wrought icon he suspected he wore. 

He sat down.

“I must inform you that your brother has killed the keeper at Orbonne and absconded with a number of rare relics of the faith. The office of the Inquisition tried him _in absentia_ , and he is under sentence of execution.” Wiegraf’s voice was a blank. He might as well have been reading from a scroll.

“I have seen his name among the condemned,” Zalbag said with as much dispassion as he could muster. “This is no great surprise.”

“Your sister is already in Church custody, and will be conveyed to Murond. I suspect no charges shall be brought against her.”

“That is good to hear.”

“As for you, General…” He paused. “I’m sure that you have been informed that no investigation was begun regarding you.” 

Wiegraf looked him very pointedly in the eye, and Zalbag allowed himself to linger on his features. They bore none of the smothered rage they had the last time he stood in this office and none of the bitter passion he remembered from when last they parted. There was, instead, a coldness to them that seemed out of joint with every other time they had met.

He was still very handsome.

“Murond, nevertheless, wishes documentation of your loyalties in this case,” Wiegraf continued. “If you could look over this statement and sign it, I think we can put matters at an end.”

As before, Wiegraf slid a sheet of vellum bearing the stamp of the Examiner onto Zalbag’s desk. As before, he read its contents. It was a simple declaration of the faith, followed by a statement that he would devote himself “to the extent of his abilities, body and soul, in life and beyond it” to the defense of the Church from those who threatened her.

He signed it and handed it back to him. Their fingers nearly glanced one another’s in the exchange but did not actually touch.

“Thank you, General.”

“Wiegraf…”

Templar Folles, who had turned as if he were about to leave, looked back at him again.

“There is no grievance with the circumstances under which I left the city last?”

“None, General. In fact, it was I who met with some penalty in the end for my attempts to detain you.”

He looked again at Zalbag, his eyes alight with an intensity that registered as neither anger nor sorrow, but attested to some meaning evidently unspoken. Inwardly, Zalbag shuddered.

He did not stop him as he turned to leave the room this time, nor did he move again until he was certain that his footfalls had faded beyond hearing.


	4. Chapter 4

Zalbag paced after that, animate with loathing at his own disquiet. If he could have transfused ice water into his veins, he would have. _What on earth had he thought would happen?_ What had he been hoping for? Had he imagined Wiegraf Folles would greet him in the midst of the imperial palace with a kiss and then obligingly throw him over his desk in a fit of passion?

He marched into the hall, uncertain where it was to which he was moving. He’d spent his whole life dodging his own irregularities: directing his thoughts away from the men with whom he fought and the men with whom he prayed, navigating again and again the ever present question as to why he—who had none of the flippant profligacy of his elder brother—remained unmarried. 

Why shouldn’t he manage in the wake of one failure? Why should he care that Wiegraf Folles, who had bedded him entirely out of some miserable spite, should conduct himself as he ought and coldly regard him as any legitimate Templar might regard a layman? 

He moved quickly, storming out of the palace and down the steps into the city as he tried through motion to cast off his thoughts. The memory of skin against his skin, of lips and teeth clumsily pressed against his own: he would be exorcised of all of it if he could. 

Zalbag circled, breathed, walked the square around the city center. Eventually, he trailed back to the desmenes of the palace. 

He recalled to himself the small chapel just inside the grounds—an obscure and seldom visited site on account of its connection to an unpopular saint. It was one of the few places to pray outside of the shadow of the cathedral and away from anywhere that might house visiting clergy. He made his way there, heart and head still racing. He told himself he would confess. He told himself he would damn the consequences for the campaign and let the Church deal with him if it came to that. It was what a penitent sinner ought do, was it not? Humiliation must needs be better than hell. 

When he arrived at the low-roofed building, compact and typical of the style popularized by Ondoria I, he strode inside without inquiry or invitation. The altar was plain, but the vault above him swirled with bright colored portraiture. Scenes Ajora’s birth, trial, death, and ascendance framed a central image of Germon martyred, his head bowed low under the shadow of an executioner’s axe. 

The saint had been a Limberrian scribe in the third century, who was killed for refusing to burn testimonies of miracles when the unconverted monarch bade him do so. His unpopularity was owing entirely to his name. Germon, apparently, sounded too close to Germonik to the ears of superstitious pilgrims. He therefore gained reputation as an intercessor only in times of last resort. 

It was not a comforting thought. 

Zalbag knelt to pray. The candles of the sanctuary were lit and incense was burning. Thinking on it, he withdrew the iron icon from where it lay under his tunic and placed it on the altar; he could not imagine he could keep it now.

It may have been only a quarter of an hour that he really was there, hands folded in supplication. It seemed, however, as if it had been much longer. Prayer allows some slippage of time. His reverie was broken by the creak of a door opening, and he turned, trying to compose himself as best he could in anticipation of addressing the shrine’s keeper.

Zalbag stood breathlessly, finding himself completely unfazed that Wiegraf should stand before him a second time that day. After holding him in his mind so long, he had been seized by an irrationality that left him wholly unsurprised that the man might turn from thought to flesh.

* * *

He remained motionless as Wiegraf approached. He merely looked to him, trying to expunge any mote of dread, anticipation, or hope as he did. In the dim light of the sanctuary, the man seemed paler than he ought—thinner perhaps too. There was a haggardness to his countenance now that Zalbag thought had some inflection of cruelty. Gazing upon him, his thoughts turned again and again to the words he had been left with on that night before he’d ridden to Dougala.

_Think of this next time you look to heaven._

God, but he had. He had. When Wiegraf finally seized him, breath hot and eyes burning, Zalbag did nothing by way of protest. All the resolve of the past hour melted from him then. He did not resist the hand wrenched hard into his hair or the lips that pressed hungrily against his own. He kissed Wiegraf back with all the desperate violence demanded of him. He would fall, then. He would be damned. As his fingers twisted themselves into the fabric of Wiegraf’s tabard, he did not care for anything that was not the immediate sense of another body embracing his own.

Some measure of shame only found him again when he was shoved down onto the white linen of the altar cloth.

“Not here…” he managed to gasp out in a bare whisper. “For God’s sake, not here.”

“Not here?” Wiegraf looked at Zalbag in vicious amusement; his grip on him did not waver. “Are you frightened that God will see us?”

There was something strange about his voice as it spoke the word “God.” It warped, sharp and keening—as if its tone were suddenly intermingled with something like a glass played with water.

“Please, Wiegraf…” Zalbag’s face burned as he looked to the vault, the fourfold image of the Saint looking down upon him. 

Wiegraf looked down upon him too. 

Bringing a hand caressingly to Zalbag’s face, he suddenly struck him.

“I asked you if you thought God was looking at you, you fucking pervert.”

Zalbag, reeling from a blow that had fallen more heavily than anticipated, struggled to get up, but he found to his shock that Wiegraf’s lone hand weighed upon his chest as though it were so much immovable stone. 

He realized that he had come here unarmed. He realized that it had not been too long ago that Wiegraf had wanted to kill him.

“Do you know what I think?” Wiegraf continued in the absence of any response, laughing bitterly. “I think there is no God watching you or any other mortal man. I think God is the delusion you devout made to punish yourselves.”

Wiegraf leaned against Zalbag, dragging his free hand against his thigh and upward as if to pull off his tunic. Zalbag tried to resist—tried to wrench himself up to standing—but it was impossible. The force of Wiegraf’s hands against his body was contrary to all sense. 

Zalbag had just cut his way through what felt to be half of the Southern Sky; he had never been in doubt of his strength of arms, and yet he lay here, unable to pry himself out of the barest grip of a man who had surely not been able to hold him so fast a month prior. He tried to twist out from under him as Wiegraf changed about his hold to start stripping him. All he succeeded in doing was ripping the sleeve of his shirt as it was wrenched from his body and thrown to the floor.

“What do you think of that?” His voice seemed distant; the hand he placed on his bare chest burned like fire. “Do you imagine those painted saints above will save you? Do you find a comfort in their machinery?”

“Wiegraf, why are you doing this?” He spoke in a desperate, gasping whisper; even now, even facing _this_ , he feared to shout. Even now, he feared someone would find them.

“Do you imagine there will come some miracle to stay me?”

Wiegraf suddenly clutched at his throat, and Zalbag felt the pounding thrum of his own heart as his hand clamped against the veins of his neck and left him struggling to breathe. He choked, thrashed, grabbed at his attacker all while the eyes of martyrs bore down upon him: Germon before the axe and Ajora complacent at the gallows.

“I think there is nobody who grants men miracles.”

His voice was _wrong_ now—wrong in its entirety. Wiegraf struck him again. The blow landed like a hammer, and Zalbag lay still a moment as a great black spot began to eat into his vision. He breathed painfully as Wiegraf left off strangling him and began to pull off his boots. 

“I think that nobody watches you but me.”

He dragged him back toward the edge of the altar and began to unlace his hose. Zalbag did nothing. Zalbag lay there and traced with his eyes the gilt lines that inter-crossed the ceiling while Wiegraf pulled free his prick and began to stroke it.

He shuddered. He had still been hard. Throughout being stripped, being struck, throughout being strangled, there had still been the burning thrill that Wiegraf should lay his hands on him again. He tried to direct his mind to the void that cut off his sight, thinking that it might swallow him as he felt his hips buck against Wiegraf’s grasp.

Leaning against his naked body, Wiegraf drew close to Zalbag, putting his free hand once again to his face. 

“Or perhaps,” he whispered, “perhaps God and the saints are watching. _Just_ watching.” 

Zalbag blinked, frightened and panting.

“Perhaps they look down upon your trials, your suffering, your failures… all as a child looks at the dying contortions of an insect or worm. Perhaps they even enjoy mankind as you all writhe in the shadow of their indifference.”

Zalbag had not responded to any of his assailant’s prior theological questions; he did not believe Wiegraf had any expectations he would answer. This time, however, he gave him a glance—pained and unfocused—and moved his lips as if to speak. 

Wiegraf abruptly slammed his head against the altar with enough force to draw blood. 

“Writhe for me!”

* * *

Everything swam about him after that—the saints, the ceiling, the red-stained altar cloth. He imagined, in that churn of blood and darkness, that he must be writhing as commanded. The hands that touched him felt like fire, raking sharp against his skin as though they bore the claws of some great beast. All things were wrong now, moving in accord with some fever logic. He was suddenly cold in the midst of the candle glow and summer heat. Outside, he heard the bells of Lesalia cathedral toll and keep tolling, reverberating without and within him as he convulsed.

All the while, Wiegraf continued to stroke him, and he continued to rut—hot and pained—against his grip. _He would fall, then._ Fingers smeared blood and foam from his mouth across his face, down his neck. _He would be damned._ Even as another blow landed, he felt himself arc towards Wiegraf’s touch.

He shuddered when Wiegraf shifted and he finally felt press of blood slick fingers inside of him. His legs were bent back now. He cast his eyes about the room, looking for something upon which to focus, some object upon which his limited vision might catch. He tried to get up again, but found that his body would not obey. He tried to say something, but could not find his voice. All around him, the light of the candles and the paint of the ceiling blurred and melted, and Zalbag realized that he had been crying. 

Looking to the figure above him, he saw what seemed the dim corona of two black horns coiling from its head. 

The illusion faded as Wiegraf leaned against him once more and said something he did not understand. Zalbag swallowed back bile, trembling at the feeling of breath against his throat—at the aching throb of his own erection and the sudden pressure of Wiegraf’s prick pushed taut against his flesh. He did not scream as he was finally fucked, senses and body failing him as he bled and wept.

He was struck again. He was struck many times. He managed in fleeting moments to force motion back into his limbs, but he hadn’t the strength or control to do more than flail. For the most part, he lay there, shaking and sick as Wiegraf speared him, hands digging into the bony ridges of his hips as he pulled him into his thrusts. 

Zalbag considered morbidly that there was something freeing to his inaction—that his inability to resist this somehow made his lust less an affront. He held no faith that God would agree with him. He could not see the roof any more, nor the sky that must lie above it.

He knew he was going to die. 

He was going to reap the full harvest of his sins here, brutalized and violated in a holy place from which he could only kick at heaven. He felt no providence in the workings of the divine. There was no light behind the darkness consuming his vision. He was going to die here, and some poor penitent would find his naked, battered body giving testament to his crimes.

As Wiegraf continued to savagely bear down upon him, he considered what a grotesque irony it should be that he could not even find his hate. Even now, bleeding and nearly blind, he tried to imagine that they were as they had been a month ago. He wanted to think of them merely as bodies once more in proximity, with all the nightmarishness of their present coupling strained away such that he could just hold to the thought that he was close to someone again.

It was a very foolish thought.

He felt his breath go bloody as Wiegraf grabbed for his throat again and drove hard into him. Everything seemed to unravel—to fall apart into sensation and light. It was when something like the jaws of a wild animal clamped into his side that a measure of his strength found him again. Casting about his hand he found a jagged piece of metal lying alongside him. 

Zalbag pressed it close in his palm and held it fast.

Then, as his vision finally faded into a deepening nothing, he moved to push it as best he could into his rapist's hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Fun Facts:** St. Germon and the peculiarities surrounding his name were very obviously drawn from the real world St. Jude, although his actual biography was made up wholly for the purposes of this story.


	5. Chapter 5

Dycedarg had fallen into a calm that allowed him to be angry: angry at not knowing if he would need to find some new general; angry that Bestrald kept demanding details as to what had happened; angry that Zalbag had done whatever it was to let himself end up as he had. 

Prior to this, when he had been dragged through the lawn by a panicked and drunken cleric and made to see what he had discovered… when he had been shown his brother, it had been different. 

He had been afraid.

It had been one of those moments suspended--one of those instants of time where every detail is preserved in perpetuity. He remembered the trilling of the cicadas outside, the sputter of candles burnt down to their sockets, that scent of so much clotted blood underlying the frankincense. The only thing he did not recall was whatever it was the keeper had been saying--some blubbered excuse or another about why he had abandoned the sanctuary.

Kneeling to where his brother lay wrapped in a stained and torn altar cloth, he had thought it strange that Zalbag should seem so small.

He had not seemed so small to him for a very long time.

Beyond that, he had not thought about anything really. He had not thought yet of the particulars of planning a funeral or stifling rumors or arranging for some stop gap while he figured out how he was supposed to take Bethla with only _fucking Bestrald_ to lead the troops. He had just looked at the body: at the cuts like so many claw marks, at the blood and spend that congealed on his thigh, at the patch of his face washed clean by what must have been his tears. When Zalbag had finally moved, Dycedarg had reached over to him and realized that his own hands had been shaking.

After that it had been easy. He’d shouted for a healer, pressed Zalbag into place so he couldn’t misalign anything by his thrashing about, and ran through how best to invent some Nanten agent stalking about the capital and how best to procure that agent that he might be hanged. He had thought to his runesword, etched with the sigils and circles about which Zalbag had always been frustratingly superstitious, and realized he had left it in the palace. He'd made do with a few simple cantrips instead--something to dull the pain and keep him still. Trying to use better magic to set bone or mend flesh this belatedly would be too much of a risk anyway, and having Zalbag crippled was not much more useful than having him dead.

Once sure that Zalbag would not move, he’d tried to clean him up as best he could. He’d decided firmly that this crime could not be taken for a rape--that he wouldn’t countenance that thought even in the privacy of his own brain. No doubt committing some petty blasphemy or another, he'd torn the edge of the altar cloth, soaked it in the baptismal font, and thereafter done his best to wash his brother of any immediate evidence that somebody had fucked him before they’d tried to kill him. 

He’d explained to the healers later that they were not to come to any mistaken conclusions.

Before they arrived, though, there passed time enough for his thoughts to wander. Washing the body of a man so injured had a ritual to it. He’d imagined it to be like washing the dead. As he had cleaned the gore from off him, revealing all those deep gaping mouths that should seal themselves into scars, he had wondered if Zalbag might tell him someday if any corresponded to the stigmata of the saints he so worshiped. 

It was a very foolish thought.

He eventually came to notice the thin gold chain dangling from Zalbag’s left hand and, following it, found the ornate icon he was desperately clutching. The filigree that ran along its left arm had been ruined where it had seemingly cut a deep gash into his palm.

He’d picked it up, turning it back and forth within his hand. It was Lionelese make. Old. He knew the piece very well.

* * *

Dycedarg still had it in his possession as he sat fuming outside the sick room, waiting for word from the chiurgeons and priests as to whether or not Zalbag was to ever awaken. Looking to the window, he watched as the red globe of the sun tipped just under the spire of the cathedral. 

He weighed the ornament in his hand and considered that it should by all rights have been his. 

It had been his for all of four days. It had been their mother’s before. She had apparently requested it be given him should she not survive her confinement. With their father not in any position to countermand her dying wishes from the field, Dycedarg had ended up at the tender age of eight with a relic worth more than five years of a sergeant's pay. He had thereafter given it to his brother when he was christened, thinking very prudently that he would receive it back with praise for his charity once Zalbag followed all their other siblings to an infantine grave. 

He smiled a little, recalling that he _had_ been credited for the charity even if it had chafed him at the time that his brother should refuse to obligingly die. It would be strange for it to fall back to him now, thirty years after it had been promised.

A young chemist clapped open the door, and Dycedarg stood and walked briskly to where Zalbag had been laid out, not waiting for a report or an invitation. The boy who ran after him did his best to convey that the general was expected to live but that they could not yet tell how badly the injuries may have affected him. Some men weathered a bad blow to the skull fine; some were given to falling sickness; some forgot themselves and went mad.

Dycedarg nodded as he sat down by the low palette upon which his brother lay. Zalbag looked a fair sight better than he had in the afternoon, but he suspected the coming twilight was helping on that count. He bade the boy bring them a taper or something and leave them be in the meantime.

Zalbag, mottled with bruises and crossed with bandages, blinked up at him. He smelt of the comfrey with which he’d doubtlessly been slathered. 

“They haven’t found the assassin yet,” Dycedarg said firmly. “They will though.”

Zalbag eyes seemed darker than they ought, even in the dim light. He shook a bit as if trying to remember something.

“It wasn’t an assassin, Dycedarg…”

“You were struck in the head. Your memory may be wanting.” He tried to sound insistent without sounding cruel. “I assure you, there was an assassin.”

Zalbag sat up haltingly as the boy ran back with a taper and was promptly dismissed again. In the added light of the candle, Dycedarg could better see the patterns that had been beaten into his brothers skin, making out the muddled outlines of hand prints. 

Zalbag looked away, fidgeting with the edge of one of his dressings. “It was my own doing, Dycedarg…” He breathed deep, voice cracking ever so slightly as he continued. “I did not meet with an assassin… I...”

Dycedarg abruptly gripped his brother’s wrist. Zalbag winced.

“You did not do this to yourself, and I am uninterested in hearing some sanctimonious chop logic as to how this is actually your fault. It was an assassin, and an assassin will be executed.”

Zalbag looked at him and looked towards the ground. He remained silent for a time, clearly putting some effort into better composing himself. Dycedarg appreciated it.

“How long is Larg willing to wait until we push into Bethla without further intelligence?” he finally said.

“It depends on what I tell him. I suspect he’s happy to dawdle about the capital through the year’s end if it comes to it.

Zalbag nodded.

“I don’t think it will come to that.”

Dycedarg relaxed his hold on his brother’s wrist while turning his palm upward. Fishing about, he produced their mother’s icon and dropped it into Zalbag’s hand.

“You were found with this.” His voice softened a little. “You’ll need to find a good jeweler to put it to rights, but I still imagine you want it back.”

Zalbag turned unexpectedly pale, eyes widening as if Dycedarg had just handed him a live adder. He moved to hold the ornament in both hands, and he shook as he looked at it.

“I was found… with _this?_ ”

“Why should that be surprising? It’s _your_ icon.”

Dycedarg furrowed his brow as Zalbag’s expression became increasingly hard to parse. At first he thought he was in some way afraid of the artifact, but it became rapidly apparent that there was more to it than that. Some strange admixture of terror, elation, and despair played out in his features, and Dycedarg thought apprehensively to the chemist’s mention of men falling to madness.

“I thought…” He began to sob. “I thought it had been lost.”

Normally, Dycedarg felt a reflexive disgust at the weeping of others, angry to be caught up second hand in the vulnerability they betrayed. In this instant though, as his brother began to cry at the sight of an icon he’d owned his entire life, he was strangely willing to follow with the current of his emotions. He laid a hand on his shoulder.

It was a few long, awkward minutes of watching his brother break down, saying something senseless about dreams and confessions. He was much relieved that Zalbag managed to quiet the outburst quickly. He watched as he set the icon down on the bed next to him.

“Dycedarg?” he asked, calm again but clearly touched by some melancholy.

“Yes?”

“Would you have prayed for me if I had died?”

It was a frustratingly self-indulgent question, but Dycedarg was willing to indulge him.

“I would have.”

He wasn’t certain if he’d sounded believable, but Zalbag smiled briefly in response.

“Dycedarg?”

“Yes?”

“Will you pray for me now?”

It was later in the night, once Zalbag had collapsed again into the respite of sleep, that Dycedarg uttered out a few lines and verses not recited since childhood--trying to remember whatever words they were that men said pleased the Saint. Even if so many decades of war had left him atheistic and privately contemptuous of the faith, he felt he owed it to his brother to keep to a promise requiring so little on his part. It was a scant and petty sort of betrayal to do otherwise.

Betrayals, Dycedarg thought, needed to carry a weight and hold to a purpose. To betray somebody without palpable cause or evident gain was a wretched and frankly distasteful habit for any man to acquire. 

Besides that, given to sentimentality as he seemed to be that evening, betrayal was one of the sins he could never imagine Zalbag committing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Fun Facts:** Comfrey is, in fact, an anti-inflammatory herb used in poultices.


	6. Chapter 6

Time had fallen apart. 

Whether Wiegraf was walking through the hot air of Lesalia in summer or bleeding out on the steps of Orbonne was indeterminate. He might well have been a boy of eight, being scolded lest he should drop the baby in the fireplace. He might well have been some vast and moldering body rotting beneath the heart of Fovoham. 

He had felt though--he did feel as if he struggled through to the surface of a greater consciousness now--as though it were really _him_ stumbling out of some chapel to a useless saint and into the throng of human life he had abandoned.

Belias had receded. Somebody had once said to him some nonsense about iron and holy symbols and the devil. It must have been his mother; Miluda never held to such cant, not even as a girl. She doubtlessly would take grievance with the thought that the charm bore any metaphysical import. 

His head swam as its origins returned to him. The piece had been one of more than a gross his father had made to sell to men marching east in want of something upon which to pray. They took ten minutes to hammer out once you got into a rhythm, and the only thing that differentiated his from hundreds of others was that somebody had let Miluda make a few strikes on the arms. She had presented it to him when he’d left, lisping through lost teeth that she’d _made_ it and that he was to carry it into Ordallia where he was to kill lots and lots of Ordallians.

Such recollections did not stay. Ordallians did not die. Everything ran through his grip as if smoke or water. The only thought of the icon he had now--the single pole around which his wavering mind revolved--was that jarring instant where Zalbag Beoulve had pushed it into his palm. 

Air hit his lungs as he stumbled through the street. A woman, basket of linen at her hips, ducked out of his way. He thought again and again to the white hot anguish of clasping hands on that altar--of the pain of those two arms of the ornament digging into their flesh. The agony of climax; the sink of despair; the jarring, trembling cold realization as to where he was and who lay crushed beneath him: it was all grafted onto that singular moment of contact. 

Prior to that, he had drifted about as uncollected fragments: chaff not yet winnowed. Everything he had remembered before the icon pierced him was like the wisps of dream that cling to a person newly awakened. He recalled the foremost points of what he--of what Belias--had done: the viciousness of his own hollowed out voice, the bright spatters of blood across Zalbag’s pale skin, the burning thrill of the rape. At the time, though, it had seemed an unreality--a facsimile of life like those set in a raree show box. 

A flower girl in the street looked at him, gape-mouthed, and he realized his hand was still bleeding.

He didn’t stop. He felt the creep of his own body beginning to move without his volition, and he fell in step with it. Footfall after footfall after footfall and he floated back to the bite of the icon and the body on the altar. The beast had brought him to _this_. It had wrenched him back to the last piece of fleeting, clumsy affection he had known, and it had made him destroy it.

Rage and despair, it once said to him.

He felt the weight of those words now.

His vision began to narrow as he pressed forward into a dust-filled plaza, thick with the smell of birds and straw. He was walking through a marketplace, he thought. Nausea hit him as he recognized the film of sweat on his skin and the damp of blood on his tabard--hidden by the red of the cloth. Somewhere else Zalbag was dying. 

Back within that broken encapsulation of time and space, though--back in that drift before awakening, he had had some passing sense that they would be back at that inn when the nightmare was over. Whatever he was before now, he had at some point and in some way imagined that all these ill dreams would unravel and he would wake up--humiliated and warm next to Zalbag Beoulve and all his ruined sanctimony. 

His face was hot. His hand stung. He tried to hold to the clarity of that moment he had been Wiegraf again--to the instant he had come to and found none of the mortifying comfort he craved. 

He’d stood there, sick and shivering in the wake of his crime. 

He’d shaken Zalbag a moment, touched his skin. 

He’d tried to make him stay.

Wiegraf began to fracture as the path he walked turned towards the cathedral. He pulled the image of Zalbag along with him. He saw his fumbling attempt to cover him with the altar cloth. He felt the fast snap of him ripping the gold icon from his neck and the press of wrapping Zalbag's hand tight--too tight--around it. He saw the mist of blood breathed out onto the altar as he lurched over to mouth words in his ear.

What were they? Belias did not let him have them. He had confessed all manner of desperate things--he knew that, but all those sins and sentiments fell away now. 

Wiegraf did not try to stay as the spire of the church came into view and that last rush of the hazy summer left him. Falling back to that dark nothing to which he was condemned, his last sensation was of crushing the iron edges of his icon into his fist.

As he faded, he imagined that it pierced him through and hit bone.

* * *

Much to his brother’s frustration, Zalbag refused to bear witness against the “assassin” once he was found, although the conceit was established even without a man to hang. Within a week of the incident, he seemed once more the model of stoic resolve, and the two men never spoke again of any portion of the matter that might embarrass the other. As far as Dycedarg was concerned, the events of that day had never happened. 

Zalbag no longer had any palpable memento of Wiegraf save for scars, which were easily lost amidst the others accrued over the course of a life measured out in battles. The one on his hand pained him a while though, and more than once he felt it throb somewhere under the thick of his gloves.

He did his best not to think about it.

Sometimes though, in the slow graying hours before dawn, he would awaken in starts, thinking he had heard some voice speak to him--something crying, calling... occasionally taunting. He remembered nothing of its words, save that it often bade him remain--that it begged that he not fade into the same dark of all other things to which it once clung.

In most instances, though, he had no recollection of it whatsoever, save that he awakened with those scant tears that were the natural consequence of restless dreams.

In time--as Larg seemed to indefinitely postpone their move towards Bethla--these moments faded.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Fun Facts:** Raree shows were early peep shows that displayed dioramas with moving parts and were recorded as being shown in the 15th century (which would make them appropriate to a setting based on the War of the Roses).


	7. Epilogue

_When they had told Izlude that his father was riding up the long path to Riovanes, he did his best to put on a semblance of relief. Showing them he was afraid would do nothing but compound the matter._

_He did not want to betray that sort of weakness. He did not want to make things worse._

_There was the solace that there would be some resolution to his weeks in captivity, however--that things would happen at last and he would no longer have to persist in the dreadful anticipation of them. They let him look to the winding path outside the tower window, where he could see the bleached and yellow plains of Fovoham running flat until they met with the edge of the Yuguewood. His father’s chocobo, angular and black-feathered, scratched a line through the dirt of the road. A little ways behind him, he saw another rider trailing behind._

_Izlude tensed as he recognized who it was._

_His joy at knowing Wiegraf wouldn’t be another death weighing upon him gave way to unease as the two men approached. Even at this distance, the figure in red looked completely unlike the man who had once rode with him to Orbonne. His features corresponded to those he remembered, but it was if the animating force within them had left. He was pale, still, and gave no gesture or glance that Izlude expected of men alive and moving._

_He shuddered. It was as if they’d tied a corpse to a bird and set it running._

**Author's Note:**

> See my [profile](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorpseBrigadier/profile) for notes on remixes, podfic, derivative works, and constructive criticism.


End file.
